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Giaxoglou, Korina and Spilioti, Tereza 2020. The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter.

Pragmatics 30 (2) , pp. 277-302. 10.1075/prag.18057.gia file

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The shared story of #JeSuisAylan

on Twitter

Story participation and stancetaking

in visual small stories

Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza SpiliotiThe Open University, UK | Cardif University

Despite an increased interest in the discourse representations of refugees in

the media, little attention has been paid so far to the circulation and uptake

of such portrayals in social media. This article addresses this gap by exam-

ining networked users’ reactions to the iconic image of Alan Kurdi, which

quickly turned into a shared story. By analyzing story frames, i.e. orienta-

tions to the Storyrealm, the Taleworld, or the Outside world (De Fina 2016)

in multimodal posts (dated September 3rd 2015), which feature the hashtag

#JeSuisAylan, we show how hashtags, comments, and images combine into

visual small stories (Georgakopoulou 2016) that prompt acts of afective and

narrative stancetaking. Our analysis calls attention to stancetaking as

embedded in storytelling activities and calls for extending the critical exam-

ination of discourse representations to the study of their uptake in practices

of story participation online.

Keywords: refugee crisis, small stories, stancetaking, story frames,

participation

1. Introduction

Visual communication is key in emerging practices and genres in social media –

also known as connective media (van Dijck 2013). As shown in the Special Issue

on Social Media and the Visual (Adami and Jewitt 2016), socially signiicant

uses of static, moving, and animated images and memes – in various combina-

tions with other resources, such as text, emoji, and hashtags – aford increased

opportunities for identity construction and participation across private and pub-

lic spheres. At the same time, such uses extend domains of control in online envi-

ronments. This double-edged nature of visuality in social media calls for nuanced

https://doi.org/./prag..gia | Published online: March

Pragmatics issn - | e‑issn -

© John Benjamins Publishing Company

understandings of its potential and limits relating to the production and sharing

of social meaning.

Visualizations of sufering in social media, in particular, constitute critical

sites for investigating how social meanings linked to political notions of humanity,

pity, empathy, and solidarity are being (re)produced, disseminated, and taken

up. As Chouliaraki et al. (2019, 308) argue: “Mediated visualities of sufering are

always bound up in relations of power that have a direct impact on our con-

ception of ‘humanity’, on who is/is not considered human and under what cir-

cumstances”. In other words, visualizations of sufering relate to questions of the

aesthetics and ethics of mourning, witnessing, and public action.

A case in point is the wide circulation of an image depicting the lifeless body

of a three-year old boy, Alan Kurdi, lying on a shore of Bodrum in Turkey. His

family had led their country of residence, Syria, seeking to cross from the Mid-

dle East to Europe and eventually reach Canada. Having settled for some time in

Turkey, the family tried to reach Kos from Bodrum on an inlatable boat, designed

for a maximum of eight people, which sailed at night, carrying sixteen passen-

gers. The boat capsized in open sea resulting in the boy’s drowning, along with his

mother, Rehanna, brother Ghalib and others on board, and adding to the toll of

3,770 people who lost their lives during migration to Europe in 2015 (IOM 2015).

The image of the boy’s lifeless body, part of a series of photographs by Turkish

journalist Nilufer Demir for the Dogan New Agency, was shared on Twitter by

Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch (Walsh 2015) and very quickly turned

into an iconic image. The boy became, thus, the face of human tragedy, initially as

Aylan, ater his name was misspelt in initial news reports.1 The wide circulation

of the image, along a series of related images from this event, which took place on

the 2nd December 2015, has arguably contributed to a shit in the framing of the

debate about migrants to a debate about refugees (Vis and Goriunova 2015, 10). It

has also played a role in reframing the so-called refugee crisis as a political crisis,

drawing attention to the inadequacy of institutions and systems to cope with the

increased numbers of people entering the European Union (Blommaert 2015).

The impact of these images on political agency has attracted not only media atten-

tion, but also scholarly interest. Goriunova (2015, 5), for example, foregrounded

the intricate connections between existing regimes of visuality and social media

publishing, while Ibrahim (2018) noted how reworkings of Alan’s photographs as

memes produced a “sensorium” – a “necro-aesthetics” where death, disaster, and

bodies become part of new aesthetic modes, transgressing political as well as eth-

ical boundaries.

1. In this article, we will refer to the boy as Alan, unless quoting directly from Twitter users’

posts.

[2] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti

This article contributes to research on mediated visualities of sufering based

on the examination of the circulation of the image of Alan Kurdi as part of shared

stories on Twitter. Shared stories, which are produced, consumed, and repro-

duced at large scales fostering particular ways of representing events, people, and

places, have been recognized as a distinct online genre (Page 2018). The analysis

of shared stories in this article draws on the practice approach to narrative (De

Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012) also known as small stories, which foregrounds

aspects of the stories’ multi-semioticity, transportability, and contextually shiting

meanings (Georgakopoulou 2015a).

The transportability of stories relies on multiple recontextualizations of

selected aspects of the story by diferent people, who draw on platform-speciic

semiotic afordances for sharing. As Georgakopoulou (2015b) has shown in the

analysis of the transposition of a critical incident event from Greek national TV,

where it was broadcast, to online platforms, and especially YouTube, the story of

the incident disseminated widely through diferent resemiotizations by a variety

of journalists, commentators, and ordinary people and created particular narra-

tive stances to the events and characters. These stances were found to be closely

linked to platform- speciic afordances and the political ailiations of selected

audiences, signalling selected aspects of context as relevant for the assessment of

events and characters. Despite the potential of this wide circulation of the story

to bring forth an array of interpretative meanings, its spectacular dissemination

ended up, in fact, closing up possible meanings and interpretations.

Georgakopoulou’s analysis foregrounds the importance of (i) aspects of a

story’s transportability and (ii) stancetaking as a central part of narrative activity.

These insights inform the approach taken in the present study of story partic-

ipation and stancetaking patterns in the shared story of Alan Kurdi’s death on

Twitter. Stancetaking is understood broadly as “a public act by a social actor,

achieved dialogically through overt communicative means, of simultaneously

evaluating objects, positioning subjects (self and others), and aligning with other

subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural ield” (DuBois

2007, 163). As we argue in this case, stancetaking is intricately connected to the

story frames that emerge in Twitter reactions to the shared story of the life and

death of Alan Kurdi.

A narrative practice approach, like the one taken in this article, is well cal-

ibrated for clarifying salient elements of the shared story with a focus on the

speciic story frames, which shape – and are shaped by – participants’ selections

and reworkings of images and the evaluative comments that accompany these.

The identiication of story frames is based on the categories of Taleworld (“the

world where characters move and live”) and Storyrealm (“the storytelling event

at the center of which the taleworld lies”). These categories are drawn from

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter [3]

Young’s (1987) distinction of the two realms involved when people are telling sto-

ries and the recognition that these realms make for diferent story frame types.

These either bracket a discourse activity as a story (Taleworld) or reveal attitudes

towards the story or the storytelling event (Storyrealm) (De Fina 2016,479). This

narrative lens on discourses of refugees in (inter)action with a focus on the pro-

duction and reproduction of story frames helps to pinpoint the speciic kinds of

acts of stancetaking and positioning created by and for sharers. More broadly, it

helps to clarify the dynamics of interaction and participation online.

The article is organized as follows: the irst section selectively overviews

research on media representations of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants

(henceforth RASIMs; see Khosravinik 2009) and provides the background to the

article’s analytic use of frames. The second section presents the data and meth-

ods for the study, alongside the research questions and coding scheme used. The

third section ofers the indings of the analysis: we present the story frames, both

verbal and visual, which we have identiied in our data, and show how these con-

nect to acts of stancetaking online. In the inal section, we assess our indings with

respect to the (re)production and uptake of discourse representations of RASIMs

in online contexts.

1.1 Previous research on media representations of refugee

Previous research on representations of RASIMs has largely focused on the study

of discourse representations in the news, particularly print news, given that these

are more easily amenable to the compilation of corpora and analysis. The signif-

icant body of work produced in this area is based on the recognition that media

play a key role in establishing speciic frames for the interpretation and assess-

ment of current realities relating to refugees and, consequently, in afecting public

opinion and sentiment towards people in sufering. A recurrent inding in these

critical approaches to the study of media representations of RASIMs is the repro-

duction of negative perceptions, which results in the ‘othering’ of these social

groups and their dehumanization in public discourse (Gabrielatos and Baker

2008).

Dehumanizing discourse further sediments existing negative representations

of RASIMs and creates feelings of contempt for them and their lives (Esses et al.

2013). Some of these pervasive negative representations include their discourse

construction as a “threat” or an “invader” to “national borders”, neglecting the

realities that motivate migration in the irst place. Ruth Wodak (2015), more

speciically, points to representations of refugees as a threat to “the national body”

in both right-wing and mainstream discourse about refugees in Europe. Male

refugees, in particular, have been the target of bias and negative categorizations as

[4] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti

“rapists” or “terrorists”. These are oten fronted as justiications for populist move-

ments that get disseminated via slogans, such as #RefugeesNOTwelcome (Walker

et al. 2016).

From 2015 onwards, however, the increased negativity surrounding the dis-

course about refugees and the dehumanizing images in circulation has been

countered to a signiicant extent by more positive and sympathetic portrayals.

For example, shits from the representation of migrants as “fortune seekers”

or “adventurers” to “innocent victims” or “vulnerable”, “tragic asylum seekers”

in need of support and assistance have been noted by a host of researchers

(Blommaert 2015; Parker 2015; Gualda and Rebollo 2016; Smith Dahmen et al.

2018). This shit to more positive representations is largely achieved through the

use of human stories (Steimel 2010; Hickerson and Dunsmore 2015; Cooper et al.

2016). For example, Smith Dahmen et al. (2018) report high emotional and sym-

pathetic reactions to images of refugee children, including Alan Kurdi. Other

scholars have pointed to the expression of strong political emotional reactions,

directing blame to national targets, governments and humanity (Mortensen 2017;

Olesen 2017).

At the same time, however, emotions of fear, hostility and the belief that bor-

ders ought to be closed continue to occupy a prevalent place in public discourse

(Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017). These diferent portrayals underline the continu-

ous shits in the framing of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in media narratives. As

Georgiou and Zaborowski (2017) note in their study of print media across eight

European countries, the emphasis on tolerance, solidarity, and humanitarianism

in September 2015 quickly gave way to discourses of securitization and fear in

November 2015.

The large bulk of media studies and critical discourse analyses of represen-

tations of RASIMs has tended to foreground aspects of these representations as

discourse products. In other words, the focus of these studies is placed on the

recurrent lexical, grammatical and discourse choices – mostly verbal – which cre-

ate speciic ways of talking about refugees and of interpreting events and realities

relating to them, i.e. producing diferent types of frames.

More recent work in critical discourse studies has considered aspects of mul-

timodality (Machin and Mayr 2012; van Leeuwen 2008) in relation to photo-

journalism (Chouliaraki and Stolic 2019; Caple 2013), highlighting how news

photos also carry meaning and how they engage and position readers attitudinally

(Economou 2014; Bouko this issue). There is still ample scope for investigations

of how such multimodal aspects combine with narrative practices in online con-

texts, especially given the fact that in media and critical discourse studies, the con-

cept of narrative is oten used metaphorically, broadly referring to ideologies (De

Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012).

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter [5]

In this article, we are interested in how representations of RASIMs are

reworked into visual representations producing and reproducing speciic kinds of

frames, which guide the further circulation of stories and sedimentation of par-

ticular stances to them in connective media. The next section discusses in more

detail the concept of frames.

1.2 Approaches to frames

The notion of frames is used in diferent ways across disciplines, with no con-

sensus over its deinition or the methods for its study, except perhaps for its

recognition as an important concept in the study of representation, meaning,

and the organization of social experience (cf. Gofman 1974). Among these difer-

ent approaches, speciic types of frames, including news, discourse (or cultural),

and interactional frames have emerged as the object of study for media and cul-

tural studies scholars, critical discourse analysts, and interactional sociolinguists,

respectively.

The study of discourse representations in the media oten draws – directly or

indirectly – on news frames, deined in terms of speciic conigurations of verbal

and visual information that propose particular angles on what the issue is about,

how it can be addressed, and who is responsible for creating and for doing some-

thing about it (Tewksbury 2015). The concept of discourse frames, which has also

been applied to the study of media representations emphasizes cognitive aspects

of frames as “knowledge representations about the world” (van Dijk 1977, 19).

These approaches to frames tend to restrict analysis to the investigation of topics

and language choices and to pay little attention to the way these discourse rep-

resentations are negotiated in everyday interaction. As Fisher (1997, n.p.) notes,

“scholars cannot identify frames by counting the appearance of key words and

phrases, or by speciic argumentative structures. Instead, one must look for sto-

rylines about what is to be comprehended.” In addition to storylines, it is also

important to look at interaction and story participation patterns.

From an interactional perspective, frames are conceived of as situated orien-

tations of participants to a discursive context, which makes meaningful interac-

tion possible or explains communication breakdowns; recognizing, for example,

whether something is said as a joke or as a serious comment is key for successful

communication. In other words, frames are understood as “part of the inter-

pretive means by which participants understand or disambiguate utterances and

other forms of communicative behaviour”, including aspects of metacommuni-

cation (Jaworski and Coupland 2006, 28–29). Frames also refer to participants’

stancetaking, i.e. the way participants in conversation shit their stance in response

to new or changing situations and to “the alignment participants take up to them-

[6] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti

selves and others in the situation” (Tannen and Wallat 2006,363). As Coupland

and Ylanne (2006) suggest, frames can be also investigated as a process through

which societies reproduce meaning (cf. Gofman 1974). This understanding of

frames points to their importance as acts of stancetaking, which shape – and are

shaped by – participants’ political, social, or cultural positioning in speciic dis-

course domains.

Acts of stancetaking in interaction are not solely speaker-centred language

phenomena associated with an individual user’s linguistic choices. Rather, they

are: (1) sequential in that the act of taking a stance oten becomes a target for the

next speaker’s stance, (2) dialogical, as stances emerge in and through interac-

tional co-participation and (3) discursive, in that acts of stancetaking are embed-

ded in other communicative acts, such as conversing, arguing, or narrating (see

Du Bois 2007, 140).

In order to apply this more interactional concept of frames and stancetaking

to the study of story participation patterns in social media communication, we

start from the widely established distinction in narrative analysis between the

taleworld, that is the world where characters move and live, and the storyrealm,

that is the storytelling event at the centre of which the taleworld lies, which is, in

turn, embedded in a conversation (or in other kinds of communicative practices).

According to Young (1987) the storyrealm and taleworld echo Gofman’s (1974,21)

notion of frames in that they work as “schemata of interpretation” used by people

“to locate, perceive, identify, and label events and occurrences to understand

participants’ perspectives on stories” (De Fina 2016,479). Story frames are, in

essence, the sites where participants’ stancetaking and positioning are articulated,

and thus constitute key sites for the study of stancetaking as embedded in narra-

tive practice.

In the present study of Twitter reactions to the shared story of the life and

death of Alan Kurdi, we are interested in identifying the salient elements of

the story and storytelling event that draw participants’ attention and evaluative

comments and create speciic kinds of stancetaking and positioning for sharers.

We argue that the narrative practice lens is necessary for moving beyond the

identiication of ‘static’ discourse representations, be they negative or positive,

and consider instead the ongoing (re)constitution of discourse representations in

(inter)action as an integral part of meaning-making and positioning practices.

The next section presents the data for this study and the methods we have used to

collect and handle them.

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter [7]

2. Data and methods

In our previous work we combined small stories (Georgakopoulou 2015; 2016)

with visual semiotics (van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2000) to examine how two iconic

images – the image of Alan Kurdi and Omran Daqneesh – portraying children’s

death and injury, respectively, were rescripted for sharing. This mode of rescript-

ing was shown to be instrumental in the creation of a visual story in-the-making,

which involved the selection, representation, visual arrangement and emplotment

of key characters in time and place in the (narrative) space of an image. We

pointed out how the ecstatic sharing of these images prompted public emotional

responses in the here-and-now calling for ‘our’ benevolent taking of action within

an emerging political spectacle and extending the mediatization of the refugee cri-

sis online (Giaxoglou and Spilioti 2018). In this article we extend our analysis of

the refugee crisis story as a shared story-in-the-making by focusing on the hash-

tag story #JeSuisAylan on Twitter. Our aim is to probe further into the circulation

and uptake of discourse representations of refugees in story participation prac-

tices online.

The data we have analysed have been extracted from Twitter. There are two

main ways of extracting data from Twitter, each of which comes with its own

merits and challenges. The irst one involves the use of APIs (Application Pro-

gramme Interfaces) and the second one the use of third-party applications, which

are “built on the Twitter platform by external developers, and are not owned

or operated by Twitter” (Twitter [no date]a). The advantages of using Twit-

ter APIs is that they are free and they follow Twitter’s terms of service; they

are however, time-consuming, while they only yield a limited amount of posts

(only 1%). Third-party Applications, also known as archives, allow the full col-

lection of posts (100%). Data extracted by Twitter’s APIs is subjected to the UK

Data Protection Act (UK Legislation 1998). For reasons of data compliance and

also convenience, we preferred to use Twitter APIs. Using the Twitter’s API we

searched for the hashtag #JeSuisAylan. We chose the hashtag #JeSuisAylan as a

key hashtag around which other related hashtags are used including hashtags

that invoke other (social) media events, such as the attacks at the Charlie Hebdo

oices in 2015. The choice of the hashtag in the data collection process has also

been motivated by its recognition as a metadiscursive and metanarrative resource

(Giaxoglou 2018) and a resource for claiming afect (Pizzaro Pedraza and de Cock

this issue). The use of hashtags is of interest as hashtags create and make widely

available frames for the interpretation of events as well as positions towards them.

The choice of the tweets yielded a multi-lingual corpus of posts in French, Eng-

lish, Spanish, and other languages, which highlights the globalizing dimension of

sharing this hashtag.

[8] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti

Results were extracted to an excel spreadsheet including the images attached

as well as replies and comments. By inserting codes for each post, we conducted

the analysis using Excel ilters which reveal selected coded categories. We have

retrieved 613 tweets covering the period between September 2 and May 31, 2016.

We focussed, more speciically, on the analysis of the tweets retrieved from the 3rd

September (i.e. the day following the boy’s death), as one third of the tweets were

posted on that date alone (182 tweets), when Alan’s photo also featured on the

majority of Western media. Given that the retrieved tweets were recovered using

Twitter’s API from one of the researchers’ personal Twitter accounts, the collec-

tion of posts cannot be seen as fully representative of other users. And yet, this

iltered sample of tweets, arguably, provides useful insights into general trends in

the circulation of visual stories of the refugee crisis and the key modes of story

participation by networked users.

2.1 Coding scheme and research questions

In this article we look at acts of stancetaking embedded in story frames in the con-

text of online participation to the shared hashtag story #JeSuisAylan. Our research

questions are the following:

1. how do networked users participate to the hashtag story #JeSuisAylan?

2. how do these participation patterns relate to existing media representations of

refugees?

To address these questions, we look for the diferent story frames produced and

reproduced through acts of stancetaking taken in the process of participating to

the shared story. To identify these frames, we draw on Anna De Fina’s analysis of

YouTube users’ comments (De Fina 2016). In her study De Fina examined partici-

pation roles in digital storytelling as they relate to the range of frames available in

an interaction.

The comments analyzed by De Fina are somewhat diferent to the material

examined here given that they revolve around a monologic, ‘big’ story that had

been shared in video format by Charlamagne Tha God, a radio host and TV

personality in the US, and then reposted on Gawker titled “This is an amazing

story about Rihanna partying”. We focus, instead, on a ‘small’ story, in the sense

of a transportable, seemingly fragmented, distributed and condensed story of an

iconic death shared via images and their accompanying comments. Despite this

diference in the story format of our data, the patterns of participation in which

these comments are produced and shared are similar in that they are intricately

linked to platform-speciic afordances of commenting in polylogal (Page 2018) or

poly-storying (Georgakopoulou and Giaxoglou 2018) contexts, where comments

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter [9]

may be physically adjacent but not necessarily referentially and explicitly con-

nected to each other. For the analysis of tweets, we use Young’s (1987) types of

story frames with a focus on “the taleworld, the storyrealm, or the external world

outside the interaction” (De Fina 2016,479); this analytical framework has been

selected for pinpointing how comments are discursively connected through the

production and reproduction of particular types of frames.

For the coding of our data, we marked individual posts for three diferent cat-

egories noting (1) details about each post (date and time stamp, username, con-

tent, interactivity metrics), (2) social media activity type and (3) story frame type.

With respect to the details we noted about each post (coding 1), in order to ensure

the anonymization of posts usernames recorded in the initial coding were deleted

at a later stage.

The content of the post refers to the tweet’s content including message and

hashtags, and any hyperlinks that may have been part of the post. In the case of

hyperlinked content, we sought to retrieve the image, cross-linked tweet or news

article, where possible (i.e. unless hyperlinks were broken links when we accessed

them).

Acknowledging that we communicate through “culturally recognized activi-

ties” with identiiable goals among community members (Levinson 1979,69), the

coding for social media activity type was aimed at providing an insight into the

diferent types of sharing users select from when participating in an unfolding

Twitter ‘conversation’ and it is summarized in Table 1. Commenting refers to posts

that feature user-created content in its own right or added to reshared content.

Posts that feature one or more hashtags or hyperlinks to an image, a news arti-

cle, or other social media proiles without any added comment to them are coded

separately as Resharing. Replying includes any public replies to a previous mes-

sage or contributions added to a thread. In the irst round of coding, we had also

included the category of cross-posting, i.e. posting automatically from another

platform but given that there were very few instances of this type of activity the

category was let out of the scheme. As Adami (2014, 226) notes automatic cross-

posting is usually discouraged and users instead prefer to personalize a post each

time it is re-posted in a diferent social media proile involving minimal interven-

tion to reshape it to suit the site- speciic audience.

Table 1. Coding for activity type

Activity type Examples from the corpus

Commenting “Charlie Hebdo keeps pushing the limits and loses support of even the people who

empathized with them. Disgraceful. #JeSuisAylan”

Resharing “#jesuisaylan #AylanKurdi” [hyperlink to picture]

Replying [UserX] added: “I agree, the worst cartoon. #jenesuispascharlie. #Iamnotcharlie.

#yonosoycharlie #jesuisaylan” [hyperlink to picture]

[10] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti

Following De Fina’s categorization, our coding for story frames initially

included four diferent foci: the storyrealm, the taleworld, the outside world, and

a second story, but ended up focusing on the irst three, given that we did not

identify any second stories in our corpus. The categories used either bracket a

discourse activity as a story (Taleworld) or reveal attitudes towards the story or

the storytelling event (Storyrealm) (De Fina 2016,479). In our data we followed a

similar path to De Fina, which involved looking irst for the main topic of the mes-

sage and then recognizing the following foci and sub-foci. This process resulted

in the coding categories summarized in Table 2:

Table 2. Coding scheme for story frames

Category Content type and examples from the corpus

Storyrealm “the

storytelling event at the

center of which the

taleworld lies” (Young

1987)

Participants: direct address to networked publics, often calling to (some

form of ) action, e.g. “#JeSuisAylan; We went to the streets for Charlie.

But for #Aylan?”

Tellability: reference to why the story is worth telling, e.g. “#jesuisaylan

Cette photo qui fait la une de tous les journaux remue toutes les

consciences.”

Shareability: exclusive use of the hashtag or a series of hashtags, e.g.

#JeSuisAylan

Metacomment: explicit reference to the hashtag #JeSuisAylan, e.g. “On

est à deux doigts du #JeSuisAylan ou #JeSuisUnMigrant”

Taleworld “the world

where characters move

and live” (Young 1987)

Character: comment on the character of the story, e.g. “#JeSuisAylan cet

enfant est le mien…; Il s’appelait Aylan Kurdi, et il avait 3 ans.

#jesuisaylan [hyperlink to image].”

Plot elements: comment on other aspect of the story, e.g. “Aylan et

Ghalib fuyaient la guerre pour un avenir meilleur [hyperlink to news

article] #JeSuisAylan #JeSuisGhalib.”

Outside World News story: explicit comment on coverage of the story in the media e.g.

“Le choc des photos. L’arrogance européenne résumée en une et en page

5 du Monde. #AylanKurdi #JeSuisAylan #réfugiés.”

Europe or the refugee crisis: explicit orientation to more general issues

relating to Europe or the refugee crisis e.g. “The European Value is

Humanity. The European Valuta is Euro Don’t mix Values and Valuta.

#jesuisAylan #refugeecrisis”)

Recognizing the multimodal nature of the posts in our corpus, we also coded

all the images that were shared alongside the posts, applying similar categories to

the ones described for the verbal story frames (see Table 3).

In the next section we present and discuss the indings from our analysis.

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter [11]

Table 3. Coding for visual story frames

Category Content type

Visual

Storyrealm

Meta-comment: creative reworkings of the image, which involve the rescripting of

time, place, or main character.

Visual

Taleworld

Character: focus on the character of the story in the image showing the boy’s dead

body in focus.

Outside

World

Mobilization: images of rallies relating to the story and visual records of

mobilization in connection with refugees.

3. Findings

3.1 Social media activity types

As Table 4 shows, in terms of social media activity types, the analysis of our cor-

pus yielded an almost equal number of posts categorised as ‘commenting’ (87

instances) and ‘resharing’ (85 instances). In terms of resharing, more speciically,

users seemed to opt for resharing just the keyword hashtag #JeSuisAylan (54

instances) and to a lesser extent a series of connected hashtags (25 instances).

There were also few instances of resharing news articles about the event (8

instances).

Table 4. Activity types (Total =182)

Activity type

Frequency of

occurrence Details

Commenting 90

Resharing 85 54 instances of resharing the keyword hashtag only

25 instances of resharing the keyword hashtag with other

hashtags

8 instances of resharing news articles

Replying  7

These indings suggest the importance of Twitter in this case as a space for

users’ comment- and hashtag-based reactions to the shared story of Alan Kurdi

with little need to refer to the details of the events – as evident in the low number

in the corpus of resharing news articles or other more extended accounts of the

related events.

There were few ‘conversations’ prompted by diferent types of posting activity,

as evident in the small number of replies to tweets. This suggests that reactions

to the story are not shared as part of an extensive engagement with user com-

ments, but instead, they take the form of one- of individual contributions to an

[12] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti

unfolding ‘conversation’ online made up of accumulating posts and aggregating

hashtags in indirect interaction with one another. This inding prompts us to pro-

pose the term inter-reactions to capture this indirect relationship created between

sequentially-ordered and spatially contiguous posting formats on social media

comment spaces, which foster modes of interaction as participation to a shared

story. This mode of participation will be further clariied in the analysis of verbal

and visual story frames and acts of stancetaking.

3.2 Story frames

The analysis of story participation shows that users’ emphasis is largely placed

on the contribution of meta-comments to the shared story of the death of Alan

Kurdi (114), as shown in Table 5. Fewer posts related to the Outside World (48) or

focussed on aspects of the Taleworld (20).

Table 5. Findings of story frame types (Total =182)

Storyrealm 114

Participants  18

Tellability  12

Shareability  79

Metacomment   5

Taleworld  20

Outside World  48

The majority of the posts categorized as relating to the Storyrealm involved

the resharing of the hashtag #JeSuisAylan or a series of related hashtags (79

instances). The use of the hashtags highlights a concern with the shareability

of the story and the further promotion of its circulation and hence its visibility

online. Fewer posts were oriented to networked publics calling for action (18

instances; see Example 1) or explicitly commented on the tellability of the story

(12 instances; see Example 2).

(1) Time for action #JeSuisAylan; Hug your children

(2) #jesuisaylan Cette photo qui fait la une de tous les journaux remue toutes les

consciences

(Trans. #jesuisaylan This photo which has hit the headlines moves all con-

sciences)

Lastly, a limited number of posts called attention to the use of the hashtag, either

negotiating the meta-message expressed by the hashtag (Example 3) or ironically

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter [13]

nodding to the quick succession of hashtags in reactions to very diferent kinds

of events, turning ‘JeSuis…’ statements into a cliche, i.e. an empty expression

(Example 4).

(3) On est a deux doigts du #JeSuisAylan ou #JeSuisUnMigrant

(Trans.: We are within a hair’s breadth from #IAmAylan to #IAmaMigrant)

(4) #jesuischarlie #jesuisaylan et dans 15 jours #jesuisequipedefrancederugby.

(Trans.: #iamcharlie #iamaylan and in 15 days #iamteamfrancerugby)

Posts categorised as invoking the Taleworld included posts, which explicitly

referred to Alan as the main character of the story (Example 5) or which invoked

some of the details of the life of the boy and his brother, Ghalib, who also died

when the boat they were on capsized.

(5) #JeSuisAylan cet enfant est le mien

(Trans.: #IamAylan this child is mine)

(6) Aylan et Ghalib fuyaient la guerre pour un avenir meilleur

(Trans.: Aylan and Ghalib escaped the war for a better future)

Finally, comments categorized as ‘Outside World’ mainly involved comments

on the broader issues the story raised about Europe, the world and humanity,

attributing blame and responsibility to diferent social and institutional actors (38

instances; Example 7).

(7) Jusqu’a quand? L’Europe doit prendre ses responsabilites et les Europeens mon-

trer leur solidarite #UE #Refugies #Syrie #JeSuisAylan

(Trans.: Until when? Europe has to assume its responsibilities and the Euro-

peans show their solidarity #UE #Refugees #Syria #IAmAylan)

Comments in this category also included a number of posts (7), which high-

lighted the ambivalent coverage of the story as encapsulated in two images fea-

tured in the French newspaper Le Monde: the image of the dead child in the irst

page and the image of a model advertising Chanel in a similar pose on a shore

(Example 8).

(8) Le choc des photos. L’arrogance europeenne resumee en une et en page 5 du

Monde. #AylanKurdi #JeSuisAylan #refugies

(Trans.: The shock of the photos. The European arrogance summarized in the

irst page and in page 5 of LeMonde #AylanKurdi #IamAylan #refugees)

The above indings suggest that Twitter afords a space for inter-reaction – rather

than interaction – taking the form of individual contributions of meta-comments,

assessments, and evaluations to a story-in-circulation, i.e. a story that is shared

among networked audiences who contribute brief assessments and evaluations of

[14] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti

it. This is evident in the predominance of comments pertaining to the Storyrealm

and highlighting a concern with further increasing the visibility of the story by

sharing it, and comments relating to the Outside World, which underline its wider

importance and relevance. The identiication of considerably fewer comments

pertaining to the Taleworld in the corpus suggests that users’ afective engagement

with the main characters of the story is limited. Instead, afective engagement with

the story appears to be driven by associations of the boy’s story to other stories

and reactions to them, e.g. the Charlie Hebdo attacks or the refugee crisis and

its implications. Users’ participation to the story is found to be centred around

the shareability of the story in the recognizable and portable format of the hash-

tag story #JeSuisAylan, which extends the mediatization of the story online. The

next section looks more closely at the story frames created by the images that are

shared as an integral part of the tweets.

3.3 Visual story frames

The majority of the images in the corpus focused on the Storyrealm, i.e. images

involved some form of visual rescripting (in 33 instances). To a lesser extent did

images concern the Taleworld, in other words fewer images involved the visual

representation of the boy’s death as portrayed in Demir’s widely shared images

(in 15 instances) and even less so, did they invoke aspects of the Outside World

(i.e. images of users in solidarity rallies; in 6 instances). More speciically, images

relating to the Storyrealm were found to involve predominantly rescriptings of the

image of the boy’s dead body on the shore, which projected positive ater- life sce-

narios (in 20 instances). Through these rescriptings, oten elaborated and made

more explicit in the verbal component of the message, users projected stances of

solidarity and positions of alignment with Alan and refugees, more generally, as

shown in Figure 1.

The example above shows a reworked image of the dead boy’s body as it was

found on the shore. The lifeless body of the boy is rescripted as a body with wings,

i.e. as an angel, while the earthly place of the shore is rescripted as an imagined

space where the boy is lying, instead of just lying on it, lifeless. The image also

features the slogan ‘Je suis Aylan’, which is repeated in the space of the message

and hashtagged alongside additional hashtags that link this story to the crisis in

Syria and refugees. This visual rescripting accompanied by the verbal component

of the tweet ofers a meta-comment on the shared story and elevates the image of

the dead boy’s body and his story into an icon of afective solidarity with refugees.

This example shows how the visual and verbal components of the message

create a coupling of the visual tellability and shareability of the story to project

forms of afective solidarity typical of online participation modes (e.g. ‘JeSuisX’).

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter [15]

Figure 1. Visual rescripting of the viral image

[Post No 532] 7:13am – 3 Sep 2015

“Je suis Aylan. #JeSuisAylan #Syria #SyriaCrisis #Refugees”

As De Cock and Pizzaro Pedraza (2018, 214) have shown in their corpus-based

study of the broadening of meaning in the case of the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie, such

uses attest to the gradual evolution of the phrase ‘JeSuis’ into an independent ele-

ment which becomes emblematic of Twitter users participating to public displays

of mourning and solidarity via the use of hashtags.

Other images pertaining to the Storyrealm include slogan memes, which are

reworkings of the popular ‘Je Suis Charlie’ meme, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. The meme slogan ‘Je Suis Aylan’

[Post No 469] 1:49pm – 3 Sep 2015

“#JeSuisAylan”

In this case, the image becomes the vehicle of visual meta-comment on the

story and projects alignment with the story character, Alan. The slogan’s presen-

[16] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti

tation re- uses the format of the slogan ‘Je Suis Charlie’ and invokes statements of

solidarity that had become the centre of media and social attention across large

parts of the world earlier that year. The rescripting of the slogan super-imposes

the story of a refugee child to the story of the attack at the oices of Charlie Hebdo

as a way of claiming attention to it and calling for afective engagement with this

story in an equally large scale of sharing.

In the corpus, there were also a number of instances of shared images of the

boy’s dead body, as it had appeared in the print news, creating frames focused on

the Taleworld (21 instances), i.e. as comments on the main character and the event

of death. These were oten accompanied by posts featuring the hashtag #JeSuisAy-

lan or posts including more extensive comments that picked up on aspects of the

taleworld rendered in an afective tone (see Example 9) or that commented on the

wider importance of the story for European institutions and values (Example 10).2

(9) Sono partito dalla Siria, Volevo andare in Canada Rimarro in Turchia.

#JeSuisAylan (Trans.: I let Syria, I wanted to go to Canada, I will remain in

[Post No: 571] 3:50am – 3 Sep 2015Turkey #IamAylan).

(10) Honte a nous! La peine de mort est retablie en Europe! #JeSuisAylan #Aylan

#migrants #JeSuisRefugie #Refugies

(Trans.: Shame on us! The death penalty is restored in Europe)

[Post No: 568] 4:17am – 3 Sep 2015

In Examples 9 and 10, the visual component of the message shows the story, zoom-

ing in on the boy’s lifeless body, while its verbal component adds an evaluative

assessment of why it’s worth telling. These messages combine textual, visual, and

hashtag components into multimodal ensembles, which are amenable to further

sharing as visual small stories. The circulation of such stories contributes to the

creation of what Ruth Page (2018) calls a shared story, which emerges from the

engagement of multiple tellers in the production, consumption, and reproduc-

tion of particular representations of events and characters and assessments about

these. These visual small stories select speciic stances on the death of Alan Kurdi

and the wider issues this death relates to, such as migration, attitudes to RASIMs,

and the grievability of lives. The next section discusses in more detail the identi-

ied story frames in relation to the acts of stancetaking that they encode and make

available for sharing.

2. In the examples we have refrained from reproducing the image of the dead boy for ethical

reasons. In these cases, we only reproduce the text that accompanies the image.

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter [17]

3.4 Acts of stancetaking

Story frames which focus on the Taleworld are based on the selection of salient

visual and verbal aspects of the story as worthy of being shared. More speciically,

visual taleworld frames involve the selection of the image of the boy’s body in

focus. These frames invoke the event of the boy’s drowning as a shared story wor-

thy of public attention and political action. By showing, rather than just telling the

story, the image registers an afective stance about the death of Alan elevated to

a symbolic level of interpretation. These visual frames are, thus, instrumental in

emblematizing the image.

Sharing the emblematic image prompts the production of more explicitly

articulated stances to the event as part of the Storyrealm, i.e. as meta-comments

to this shared story. These meta- comments highlight the tellability of the story

and the wider importance and relevance of the events for networked users. The

use of verbal taleworld frames, on the other hand, points to the selection and

foregrounding of basic story elements, for instance the tragic journey of the boy

expressed in the irst person (see Example 9 above) or the report of story orienta-

tion elements, such as the boy’s name and age expressed in the third-person (see

Example 11).

(11) Il s’appelait Aylan Kurdi, et il avait 3 ans. #jesuisaylan.

(Trans.: His name was Aylan Kurdi, and he was 3 years old. #iamaylan)

[Post No 608] 12:20pm – 2 Sep 2015

Such individual reactions to the story shared on Twitter prompt speciic modes

of story participation and stancetaking online. In this type of stories, the image

serves as the target of the evaluation of the story and the post as the space for

expressing assessments on the event and characters, as discussed in the previous

section.

The hashtag #JeSuisAylan is the most common act of stancetaking in the

visual small stories in our corpus. This stance is expressed in the irst-person point

of view, anchoring the evaluative angle on the story to the individual user and cre-

ating a position for oneself in inter- reactions to this shared story. In some cases,

the irst-person singular focus is extended to the irst-person plural signalling an

inclusive ‘we’ as taking up this stance (see Example 14).

(12) Nous le sommes tous. #jesuisaylan.

(Trans.: We are all this. #Iamaylan’)

The expression #jesuisaylan can be taken to illustrate Du Bois’ deinition of stanc-

etaking as follows: “I evaluate something, and thereby position myself, and thereby

align with you” (Du Bois 2007, 163). At the same time, this act of stance-taking is

[18] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti

communicated as a dialogic act through the use of hashtag, which points to an

intended connection to networked audiences. Importantly, this act of stancetak-

ing is iterable and transportable in that it is produced for further circulation.

The (inter)textual and visual combinations that make up the visual small sto-

ries invoke sociocultural value by expressing evaluations at diferent levels. These

evaluations involve picking up the image of the dead Alan as the most salient

element of the storytelling event, freezing it as a storytelling moment and show-

ing it for further sharing. This mode of showing rather than telling mobilizes

the expression of afective stances relating to sympathy and solidarity with the

plight of children like Alan. In some cases, these stances extend to expressions of

alignment to migrants (e.g. We are all migrants. #JeSuisAylan) and refugees more

broadly (#Refugies pour moi l’accueil c’est OUI! #AylanKurdi #JesuisAylan #Jesu-

isrefugie #refugeeswelcome #PS; Trans.: #Refugees for me the welcoming is YES!

#AylanKurdi #JesuisAylan #Iamarefugee #refugeeswelcome #PS).

Despite the mimetic character of acts of stancetaking in reaction to the tragic

story of Alan, it is important to note that such reactions can be said to be moti-

vated by viewers’ need to restore order in the face of an event that causes high lev-

els of discomfort and distress, namely a child’s death, which is the most marked

type of death. Participation to the shared story via visual and verbal meta-

comments seems to attest to the phenomenon of what is known in psychology

as parasocial mourning (De Groot et al. 2015), whereby distant viewers who are

emotionally moved and afected by a death of someone they didn’t know before.

Media scholars have pointed how social media have aforded increased opportu-

nities for constructing such parasocial relationships with celebrities or TV charac-

ters (e.g. Lawerence Kutner, a character on the series House, M.D.) through which

fans claim entitlement to public displays of mourning (Klastrup 2015, 2018).

The case of this emblematic death, in particular, makes available positions

of distant witnessing to the death of the ‘Other’. These positions resonate with

stances to the Other’s sufering mediated by emblematic photographs in earlier

historical moments. As Sontag (2004, 107) notes “certain photographs – emblems

of sufering, such as the snapshot of the little boy in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943,

his hands raised, being herded to the transport to a death camp – can be used

like memento mori, as objects of contemplation to deepen one’s sense of reality; as

secular icons, if you will”. The amenability of the media image of Alan’s death to

artistic rescriptings and visual small stories extends its meaning and upscales it to

a symbol of (distant) death. Similarly to the ‘about-to-die’ images whose presenta-

tion draws attention to the generalizability of the event, rather than its speciicity

(Zelizer 2010,25), Alan’s image produces an emotional and contingent audience

involvement which sidesteps the complex details of the life narrative of the boy,

his family, his country or other refugees.

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter [19]

4. Conclusion

The key story frames – verbal and visual – identiied in this study point to popular

tropes for approaching the Other’s death and sufering. They suggest a possible

path for explaining how discourses about refugees circulate and become further

sedimented on social media, attesting for example “the shit in media representa-

tions of refugees as vulnerable” (Gualda and Rebollo 2016; Smith Dahmen et al.

2018). As other scholars have noted, such shits in representations are largely

achieved via the use of human stories (Steimel 2010; Hickerson and Dansmore

2015; Cooper et al. 2016). As we have demonstrated, Alan’ death is foregrounded

as the focus for public assessment via individual acts of stancetaking embedded in

practices of sharing visual small stories within existing regimes of mediated visu-

alities of sufering.

In these individual visual small stories, which combine images, hashtags, and/

or comments the image becomes the main vehicle of the meta-comment to the

shared story, while the text or hashtag in the post supplements it and renders the

main message more explicit (e.g. #JeSuisAylan #NoOneIsInnocent). The sharing

of this type of stories (re)produces iterable stances, which contribute to the co-

creation of a shared story for projecting afective frames to the event. This circula-

tion drive of this shared story does not rely so much on the detail about the story

or the clariication or further exploration of related events, causes of the events,

and second stories. Rather, the circulation drive of these stories lies in the oppor-

tunities they create for tellers to participate in the telling and evaluation of these

events through taking up a stance on characters and events drawing on and align-

ing to familiar tropes and frames.

More speciically, these frames echo stances to refugees identiied in previous

research and include, for example, compassionate stances, tender-hearted, blame-

illed, shame-illed, powerlessness-illed (Hoijer 2004) or generally emotional

sympathetic reactions (Smith Dahmen et al. 2018), which are oten combined

with the expression of strong political emotional reactions, directing blame to

national targets, governments and ‘humanity’ (Mortensen 2017; Olesen 2017). In

our corpus, stances expressing emotions of fear, hostility and the belief that bor-

ders ought to be closed as the ones found by Chouliaraki and Stolic (2017) were

extremely rare.

Even though media oten rehumanizes refugees (Wallace 2018, 22) the senti-

mental portrayal of refugee stories as tragedies can be harmful in diferent ways.

Instead of mobilizing public and political agency, media coverage of migration

ends up creating spectacles of human sufering, turning reporting into acts of

voyeurism and raising “vague awareness” of largely apathetic spectators (Rae

et al. 2017; Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017). Based on the analysis of our corpus, we

[20] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti

suggested that the circulation of stances through sharing visual small stories cre-

ates alignment frames that guide the reception of this story in relation to other

stories. This mode of sharing creates positions of ambient solidarity as a form

of phatic and evaluative communion of networked publics around the so-called

refugee crisis.

The circulation of visual small stories on Twitter in reaction to the iconic

image of Alan Kurdi illustrates how media spectacles extend to social media spec-

tacles of afect, which prompt mediated participation to the death and sufering of

the Other. In cases of reporting instances of sensational and tragic death, like the

boy’s death, which are inherently reportable, the tellability of the story on social

media is contingent upon its shareability. The resharing and reworking of the

emblematic image shiting from Taleworld to Storyrealm frames partly explains

how this shared story continues to accumulate afective value over the time of its

circulation (see also Bouko, this issue) and ends up reproducing equally emblem-

atic stances.

We would like to argue that the study of processes of circulation and uptake

of discourse representations is a productive direction for critical discourse and

narrative analysis, as it can provide important insights into how mediatization

extends in online contexts fostering speciic modes of participation as forms of

online inter-(re)action. If, for Sontag (2004, 80), “[t]o remember is, more and

more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture”, this study suggests

that to remember is to be able to call up a shared and shareable story that places

us in positions of mediated witness to distant death and sufering. In the wake of

highly mediatized death events and tragedies, networked users are urged to airm

already circulating stances, instead of investigating widely shared stories in rela-

tion to the ‘bigger’ stories of war and power and the ‘small’ stories of sufering and

death with which such events and those involved are bound up.

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Address for correspondence

Korina Giaxoglou

The Open University

School of Languages and Applied Linguistics

Level 1, Stuart Hall Building

Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA

United Kingdom

Korina.Giaxoglou@open.ac.uk

Biographical notes

Korina Giaxoglou is Lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics at The Open Uni-

versity, UK. Her research focuses on narrative, afect, and practices of sharing and participation

online. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including Pragmatics, Applied Lin-

guistics Review, and Discourse, Context, and Media. She is the co-editor of the Special issue on

Networked Emotions (with Stacey Pitsillides and Katrin Döveling, Journal of Broadcasting &

Electronic Media, 2017) and on Mediatization of Emotion on Social Media (with Katrin Dövel-

ing, Social Media + Society, 2018). Her research monograph on sharing small stories of mourn-

ing on social media is forthcoming by Routledge.

https://orcid.org/---

Tereza Spilioti is Senior Lecturer in Language and Communication in the Centre for Language

and Communication Research, Cardif University. Her current research focuses on areas of

digital language and communication, particularly multilingualism, language and media ideolo-

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter [25]

gies, and research ethics. She is the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Language and Dig-

ital Communication (with A. Georgakopoulou 2016) and of the Special Issue on ‘The Ethics

of Online Research Methods in Applied Linguistics’ (with C. Tagg, Applied Linguistics Review,

2017).

Publication history

Date received: 16 November 2018

Date accepted: 7 January 2020

Published online: 6 March 2020

[26] Korina Giaxoglou and Tereza Spilioti